A team of scientists announced on Thursday that they had heard and recorded the sound of two black holes colliding a billion light-years away, a fleeting chirp that fulfilled the last prediction of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

That faint rising tone, physicists say, is the first direct evidence of gravitational waves, the ripples in the fabric of space-time that Einstein predicted a century ago. (Listen to it here.) It completes his vision of a universe in which space and time are interwoven and dynamic, able to stretch, shrink and jiggle. And it is a ringing confirmation of the nature of black holes, the bottomless gravitational pits from which not even light can escape, which were the most foreboding (and unwelcome) part of his theory.

Einstein’s general theory of relativity describes how space and time bend, as a consequence of the effects of mass's gravity, and as a result of the non-uniform motion of acceleration. Dr. Kip Thorne of the California Institute, an integral member of the LIGO team suggested that the black holes observed created a storm "in which the flow of time speeded, then slowed, then speeded," he said. "A storm with space bending this way, then that."

To put this as simply as possible, neither space nor time should be thought of as unchangeable or universal frameworks. Massive amounts of gravitational force has the ability to quite literally manipulate space time in measurable ways, this experiment directly reaffirmed this idea.

Consider then that there is no universal present moment that corresponds to the entire universe, gravity and acceleration make that quite impossible.